Diverge and Conquer (Look to the West Book 1)

by Tom Anderson

  But the Royal soldiers on the ground were nervous, after so many attacks, and demanded that Le Diamant’s guards give up their weapons while they were still more than half a mile from the gates of the Palais de Versailles. The bodyguards refused, on the reasonable grounds that there was too much of a risk of an attack from one of the political gangs stalking the streets. The captain replied that they would protect Le Diamant themselves. The bodyguards replied that frankly, they did not trust the royal soldiers with Le Diamant’s life.

  Le Diamant himself attempted to smooth things over, but it was already too late. As he and his bodyguards faced off with the soldiers and the procession came to a halt, a crowd began to gather around them, a crowd mostly made up of Jacobin sympathisers. The crowd chanted anti-Royal slogans, jeered at the royal guards and, infamously, one voice suggested that Le Diamant was being taken away to be executed.

  That ignited the tension. The bodyguards refused to leave Le Diamant’s side or give up their weapons, the soldiers insisted, someone fired the first shot—quite possibly someone in the crowd—and all hell broke loose.

  A few minutes later, seventeen men were dead. Among them was Le Diamant himself, the man who had led France’s Revolution thus far, the man who had given it the momentum that would now be seized upon by others for their own ends. It is not even certain that it was the soldiers who killed him, in the confusion of the brawl and the blurring of the historical record. Indeed, some modern Adamantians have argued that Le Diamant was deliberately killed by the Jacobins, having planned for what would happen next. Whether this is literally true or not, the Jacobins certainly proceeded to metaphorically murder everything Le Diamant had stood for.

  For enough Jacobins had been present in that crowd, enough had escaped, for the “true” story to become official: Le Diamant had been murdered, on the King’s orders, by Royal troops.

  And France destroyed itself.

  MAP OF EUROPE IN 1794

  Chapter #19: Choke Point

  From: “FRANCE’S TRAGEDY: A History of the Revolution” by A.J. Galtier (originally published 1973, English translation 1984)—

  It has often been suggested that the death of Le Diamant was the ultimate catalyst for the darkest phase of the Revolution and the rise of the Jacobins. While there is certainly some truth to this assertion, it is disingenuous to assume that these developments were inevitable. Indeed, to do so (in the fashion of the Montevideo school of Societist thought) leads to the dangerous intellectual fallacy of absolving those who committed atrocities of their crimes, as they were simply “fulfilling a historical inevitability”. Small comfort to the thousands who died with their lungs phlogisticated or their heads rolling on the ground.

  It is quite possible that, if the National Legislative Assembly had possessed more moderate and pragmatic members, the incident could have been smoothed over, even worked to a liberal advantage by using it as an excuse to reduce royal powers further, towards a “British-style” (as it would have then been termed) constitutional monarchy.

  But cooler heads did not prevail. Once more those of the Montevideo school would argue that the lack of such cooler heads is another historical inevitability, that Louis XVI paid for the fact that he and his predecessors had allowed absolutism to continue so mercilessly for so long, putting off reform until it was required to avert economic collapse. If the Bourbons had reformed more gradually, the Societists argue, they might have eventually had a more moderate National Legislative Assembly and not suffered such terrible losses and tragedies. But to make such an argument is to abrogate the NLA of its crimes, and that is a mistake.

  Riding a wave of public anger at the death of Le Diamant, the Jacobins—already the largest faction within the NLA as a whole, if barely—seized the instruments of power. Their former candidate for chief minister, Jean-Baptiste Robespierre, began issuing orders as though he had indeed been approved by the King for the position. Louis XVI was not a stupid man, but once more he paid for being so insulated from real events. The King did not hear of the Jacobins’ actions until fully two days after Le Diamant’s body had hit the cobbles, and then waited three hours before issuing orders to the troops to keep the peace, agonising about whether it would inflame the situation. By then, it was too late.

  A large percentage of the royal troops simply deserted, often defecting straight to the Jacobins. Many of them were Parisians who could not stand the shame of the people of Paris jeering and hurling stones at them, accusing them of murdering the popular Le Diamant. Thus the majority of the Gardes Françaises were lost. Others, those from the Gardes Suisses and regiments brought in from other provinces and generalities, simply retreated in the face of public anger, not having clear orders from royal authority as to whether they were supposed to fire on civilians or not. The civic government of the city disintegrated. Paris was ruled by the mob, and the mob was controlled by Robespierre.

  Yet many troops remained fiercely loyal to the King, even in the absence of coherent orders from His Most Christian Majesty. Several loyal companies of the Gardes Françaises were rallied together with outside troops by Phillipe Henri, the Marquis de Ségur, one of the Marshals of France and the only one present in Paris during the crisis of Le Diamant’s death. Ségur believed that the chaos, along with the revolution as a whole, was a transient fad and could be weathered if the military would hunker down in carefully chosen strongpoints and stand fast as the waves of disorganised public opposition beat uselessly against them like water on cliffs. “What the shopkeeper or the farmer or the peasant wants more than anything is not liberty or rights or even riches, but simply the knowledge that tomorrow he will be in much the same state as he is today, his belly full and his family secure,” he wrote. “All we have to do is wait for the revolutionaries to prove to the people that the chaos they promise is more likely to end their lives than enrich them, and then the whole mass of traitors will collapse”.

  Unfortunately for Ségur, there were two fatal flaws to his plan. Firstly, since the logistics and communications apparatus had broken down along with the rest of military discipline across much of Paris, he was simply unaware that the vast majority of the forces stationed in Paris had deserted or defected. Either that, or else he dismissed such reports as Jacobin propaganda. Secondly, the mob he faced was not as disorganised as he imagined, but ideologically fed and led by the Jacobins. And, in a moment of irony, it was Ségur himself who would unintentionally give the Jacobins the mythic image they needed to cement their hold on France.

  Ségur realised that the most important point to be held in Paris, except the Palais de Versailles itself, was the Bastille Saint-Antoine. Originally built as a defensive fort, much like England’s Tower of London it had gradually become both a prison and an arsenal. Thus, it was both a defensive position and an endless store of ammunition and supplies for any army that sought to hold it. In addition to this, the Bastille was seen in the popular imagination as a symbol of royal power, and so if Ségur’s forces could hold the fort against Jacobin attacks, it would be a potent symbol that the monarchy would withstand the Revolution.

  All of which was true, but it also meant that the reverse result—that of the revolutionaries taking the Bastille—would create an equally potent symbol for the opposite cause. And this was in fact what occurred.

  Ségur’s forces first moved into the the Bastille on the evening of May 4th1795, quickly turning it back into a fortress. While military discipline held sway in the Bastille, at the same time most of the rest of the military forces in Paris were disintegrating, unbeknownst to Ségur. It was not until the afternoon of the 5th that Ségur heard that Versailles was threatened and considered sending forces to escort the King to the Bastille, where he could be protected. By that point, the Jacobin-inspired mob had already managed to overwhelm the royal guard and seize the palace. What resulted was what Goethe described as “the New Barbarism”, even though it would rapidly be overshadowed by later developments. The palace was ransacked, with countless valuab
le paintings and tapestries looted or destroyed, and soon the furniture of kings could be found in common houses and hovels scattered all over Paris.

  The royal family themselves were not harmed. At this point the majority of the mob still had an inbuilt fear and respect for the royals, a relic of the ancien régime they had been raised under. The King in his person, as opposed to as a symbol of royal power, attracted more curiosity than hostility from the common people. They had captured the King and Queen, the Comte de Provence, the Duc d’Orleans and Maria Antonia of Austria (Marie-Antoinette), the wife of the Dauphin.[137] The Dauphin himself was not present, though; Louis, technically re-titled “Prince of the Royal Blood of Latin France” by the NLA’s early reforms, had been sent to Navarre for discussions as to whether Navarre would be directly incorporated into the new French state or would become a separate kingdom, perhaps with himself as its king. He, and his entourage, therefore escaped the coup.

  The royal family was swiftly placed under arrest by Robespierre and the Jacobin-dominated NLA. At the same time, Robespierre’s fiery lieutenant Georges Hébert ordered the expected attack on the Bastille by the mob, supported by those troops who had defected to the Jacobin side. Because they still wore the same uniforms as the loyalist troops on the other side, to avoid friendly-fire confusion those rebel troops discarded their shakoes and instead marched bare-headed or with red cloth caps designed to represent the Phrygian Cap of liberty.[138] On this day, May 7th 1795 (or 18th Flóreal of the year Minus 1 as it would later be known to some), the soon-to-be dreaded uniform of the Revolutionary soldier would start to come into being. Before the week (or decimalised décade for that matter) was out, it would be completed.

  The first attack on the Bastille was, predictably, bloodily repulsed by Ségur’s professional troops. Grapeshot ripped the still largely undisciplined mob to shreds. It is no exaggeration to say that the streets ran with blood like water, perhaps even that they were flooded with it as the gutters blocked and overflowed. After the first two frontal attacks were both reduced to bloody rags filling the streets around the Bastille, Ségur ordered his troops to hoist the royal flag, a white banner with the countless golden fleur-de-lys of France ancient, to mock the Jacobins.[139] Give up your futile struggle! was the message he wished to send.

  But the Jacobins did not give up. Just like Ségur, their commanders knew that the revolutionary fervour of the people would eventually run out and they would hesitate, no longer willing to charge into a hail of bullets for the sake of an idea. To that end, on the 6th of May, yet another frontal attack was launched, with no further success, while defecting sappers concealed themselves in the mess of bodies on the streets and used the distraction to plant gunpowder explosives beneath weak points of the Bastille wall. At midnight, when the majority of Ségur’s garrison was asleep, the fuses were lit and the old fortifications were blasted apart by the modern techniques devised by Vauban and his successors.

  Ségur’s troops were still disciplined and immediately attempted to plug the gap, before being hit by grapeshot from cannons that the Revolutionaries had brought up in the night. The mob cheered as the troops got a taste of their own medicine, and then charged through the breach.

  Despite most of the troops being hastily awakened and the rest being killed by the grapeshot, the Revolutionaries still suffered heavy casualties. But by the time Ségur was apprised of the events, it was already too late to do anything about it. The old Marshal went down fighting, both of his pistols being fired mere seconds before the butcher’s knife of a Sans-Culotte sliced through his heart. In later times, Ségur would become a hero, a martyr, of French Royalism. For now, he would be used for the Jacobins’ own purposes.

  As the crowd cheered and looted the Bastille, releasing the few prisoners from the dark fort—the Jacobins would claim that it was this act of liberty that had motivated the attack, not getting hold of the arsenal there—one man, a soldier who had gone over to the Jacobins, came to the fore. His name is not recorded in history. Like Le Diamant, he became a legend, L’Épurateur, the Purifier, a name given to him by Robespierre. He had only defected the day before, but in that time his ears had been filled with the revolutionary message the Jacobins preached. There is no fierier zealot than a new convert still half trying to convince himself of the truth of his new way.

  L’Épurateur was already covered in blood from the battle, like most of his fellow survivors. Now, he took out his sabre and cut the head from Ségur’s corpse, working meticulously. He took the head to the largest flagpole, where his fellow Jacobins had brought down the Royal flag and had been about to tear it to pieces, but L’Épurateur shook his head. “Non.” It was not enough for the flag simply to fall. The people must see what that flag had stood for.

  He took the flag and smeared it all over with Ségur’s blood, dying the pristine noble white with the shed blood of the people. Then he turned it upside down and it was raised once more, the fleur-de-lys turned over, the monarchy overthrown by the blood that had been shed by the revolutionary fighters.

  And thus the symbols of the Revolution were complete. The crowds saw L’Épurateur standing on the battlements of the Bastille in the moonlight, the white parts of his blue uniform stained red by the blood of the battle, wearing the Phrygian cap, his white Bourbon cockade dyed bloodred, and the red flag flying above him.

  Vive la Révolution!

  Et mort au roi!

  Chapter 20: Cette obscurité glorieuse

  From: “FRANCE’S TRAGEDY: A History of the Revolution” by A.J. Galtier (Université Royale de Nantes, 1973)—

  It all happened so rapidly. Indeed in many ways, for many years to come, in France everything would seem to come in a rush. The new powerful men of France knew that their position was tenuous. They did not have the luxury of the Bourbon kings who had come before them, when it had taken centuries for discontent to coalesce into an organised and intellectual-backed revolution instead of ineffective peasant revolts. No; the Revolutionary genie was out of the bottle, and they risked it turning against them. The solution was to keep the people so occupied that they did not have the chance to do so.

  Even as the royal family were placed in a mean common jail by the Jacobins, the NLA began to issue “reforms” at a bewildering rate. It was not merely a case that a man could wake up in a different state to the one that he had fallen asleep in; France changed by the hour. This also meant that foreign commentators in Madrid, London and Vienna barely had a chance to absorb the information of the earlier, more benign stages of the Revolution before the news of Le Diamant’s death and what came after fell upon them. When moderate figures there were being assailed by the confusing shift of the Revolution, only two groups held firm—ultraroyalists who would always condemn anything associated with the Revolution no matter how reasonable, and radicals who would praise any such thing no matter how horrific. As a consequence, the partisan divide sharpened and narrowed, with few willing to embrace a position of qualified approval or disapproval.The Revolution was not merely the death of moderation in France, but elsewhere also.

  The unknown soldier known as l’Épurateur was never seen again after that fateful night, when he raised the Bloody Flag above the Bastille. What happened to him has been the subject of many theories then and since. The most likely possibility is that he was simply killed later that night in the fighting still raging throughout Paris between the Jacobins and Sans-Culottes and the royalists. However, some have suggested that L’Épurateur simply faded into obscurity and died in a later battle. Most controversially the Royalist historian Pierre Beauchamp has claimed that l’Épurateur disowned his “drunken” antics on the Bastille and later returned to the Royalist side.

  No-one will ever truly know, but Hébert, who had witnessed the event, was swift to capitalise on it. L’Épurateur became a mythic figure, emblematic of the new France and thence a martyr, stabbed in the back by a Royalist assassin for his act of courage. A large number of French people, even some historians, st
ill believe that l’Épurateur was purely an invention of Hébert and there was never such a living, breathing person. Whatever the truth, the Jacobins and their Sans-Culotte allies were driven to new strengths by the great symbol they had been gifted with.

  By the hour and the day, the NLA was “reformed”. Moderate ‘Mirabeauistes’[140] still in favour of a constitutional monarchy were shouted down and even attacked in the street. Those genuine royalists among the Third Estate’s deputies fled, or claimed a conversion to Jacobinism—L’Épurateur’s own late switch made this sufficiently plausible that a number of royalists either fearful of their lives, or believing that their cause was lost, were able to switch sides.

  The deputies of the First and Second Estates were sidelined as those Estates were effectively disenfranchised, all in the name of liberty. In less than one week, all titles of the nobility were abolished, the Catholic Church was effectively “nationalised” and turned into an arm of the government, with priests having to swear allegiance to the Revolution, and land ownership was revoked. The Revolutionaries sought to usurp the Great Chain of Being itself, so that all men would be equal—and death to those that disagreed.